They may always deceive, for you must trust them, as for instance, if you travel, to ask a bill of Particulars is to purre in a wasp's nest, you must pay what they ask as sure as if it were the assessment of a Subsidy." But the wittiest and shrewdest of the prose critics of Holland was Owen Feltham, from whom I quote later.

His little book on the Low Countries is as packed with pointed phrase as a satire by Pope: the first half of it whimsically destructive, the second half eulogistic.

It is he who charges the Dutch convivial spirits with drinking down the Evening Starre and drinking up the Morning Starre.
The old literature tells us also that the Dutch were not always clean.

Indeed, their own painters prove this: Ostade pre-eminently.

There are many allusions in Elizabethan and early Stuart literature to their dirt and rags.